


Illumination

by SilverShadowBeliever (TotooftheSouth)



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Betrayal, Gen, goddamit sjin, somewhat obscure metaphysical gore??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 12:04:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1265839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TotooftheSouth/pseuds/SilverShadowBeliever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nano has learned something from each of her teachers, for better or worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Illumination

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this a while ago for tumblr and realized just recently that I'd never put it on AO3 :P

Sjin taught her about beginnings and endings.

To sow life, reap it, and sow it anew. The cyclical nature of all things was indispensable knowledge for a young god, or so Ridge had insisted. She learned that even mortal things were eternal in a sense, even more so than her own nature, because theirs was a state ever changing.

She marveled, one morning, at the wheat she’d planted weeks ago and promptly forgotten about. She’d been more concerned with following Sjin around the farm, learning about things far more interesting than wheat. Still, her crop had prospered and now swayed before her, amber and robust. They harvested it that afternoon and she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, she was being left behind.

When she’d asked Ridge if they were truly immortal, he’d merely shrugged and said, “We are until we’re not. Or we choose not to be.”

Then he’d ushered her off, back to Sjin and his crops, and as she waved goodbye, she wondered if he’d always looked so tired.

-

Sips taught her about betrayal.

The hiss of the fuse startled her and she wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see when she turned to look at Sjin in that instant before the explosives went off, but it hadn’t been this. Her patient, good-humored mentor had vanished and she hardly recognized the man that stood watching her, his grin wicked and knowing. He’d known. There was no way he hadn’t seen this coming, and it was likely that he’d even helped set it all up.

He stepped forward to take his place beside Sips and it was like watching a snake shed it’s skin. Then, she was streaking across the sky, burning like a comet in her decent.

When it was over, she crawled out of her crater, covered in dirt and ash and gagging on the scent of her own burnt hair.

-

Lalna taught her to wonder.

There was something frightening about a man who looked at the laws of nature and wondered how far he could bend them before they broke.

She’d spent enough time with Ridge away from mortal eyes, seen him haggard and frustrated and desperate, devoting every ounce of his being to maintaining the fragile balance of the universe. And it truly was fragile. If something shifted just a little too far, even just a little, everything would collapse in on itself.

Ridge worked hard enough that Nano was relatively certain that that would never happen, but Lalna loved to push. She sat in silence, some nights, perched atop a chest while he worked fervently away in his lab. Observing the fabric of space and time wasn't enough for him, despite the fact that he might have been the only mortal who was capable of it. He needed to grasp it and rend it apart, to get a look at the spaces between and maybe change things around if he didn't like what he saw. She looked on from the edge of her seat with her heart thrumming in her throat, simultaneously terrified and exhilarated.

It was only when he turned that same manic gaze on her that she realized she had once more chosen her teacher poorly.

To his credit, he was honest about it, though that may have had more to do with his inherent tactlessness, born of a lack of regular human interaction, than with any type of real concern for her. Still, she appreciated it and didn't think about what exactly that said about her.

“I wanted to see what you’d do,” he’d said, after a portal had suddenly torn open beneath her feet. She’d barely had time to realize she was falling, to remember that she could, in fact, fly, before she was slamming into the ground at the base of the highest tower in Lalna’s keep.

“I was curious,” he’d said, after he’d given her enough Rum to poison Honeydew and found her retching what tasted like blood into his fountain the next morning.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, as he sealed her up in her tower for her “own good.” Never mind that he’d been the one to shove her into the flux chamber to begin with. She couldn’t understand why he bothered locking her in. The flux burning through her frame made her muscles seize and go lax in intermittent spurts. She could barely move, let alone try to leave. Odd beams of scattered light occasionally broke through her skin, painting the room in a glittering spectrum, and she wondered if this was how Gods died.

She got the feeling that Lalna had wondered that too, before he'd sent her tumbling into the flux.


End file.
